Soap

SOAP (see below for name and origins) is a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer networks, normally using HTTP/HTTPS. more...

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SOAP forms the foundation layer of the Web services stack, providing a basic messaging framework upon which abstract layers can be built.

There are several different types of messaging patterns in SOAP, but by far the most common is the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) pattern, in which one network node (the client) sends a request message to another node (the server) and the server immediately sends a response message to the client. SOAP is the successor of XML-RPC, though it borrows its transport and interaction neutrality and the envelope/header/body from elsewhere, probably from WDDX.

History

SOAP originally stood for Simple Object Access Protocol, and lately also Service Oriented Architecture Protocol, but is now simply SOAP. The original acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, which became a W3C Recommendation on June 24, 2003, as it was considered to be misleading.

SOAP was originally designed by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein in 1998, with backing from Microsoft (where Atkinson and Al-Ghosein worked at the time), as an object-access protocol. The SOAP specification is currently maintained by the XML Protocol Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Transport methods

SOAP makes use of an Internet application layer protocol as a transport protocol. Critics have argued that this is an abuse of such protocols, as it is not their intended purpose and therefore not a role they fulfill well. Backers of SOAP have drawn analogies to successful uses of protocols at various levels for tunneling other protocols.

Both SMTP and HTTP are valid application layer protocols used as Transport for SOAP, but HTTP has gained wider acceptance as it works well with today's Internet infrastructure; specifically, HTTP works well with network firewalls. SOAP may also be used over HTTPS (which is the same protocol as HTTP at the application level, but uses an encrypted transport protocol underneath) in either simple or mutual authentication; this is the advocated WS-I method to provide web service security as stated in the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1, see . This is a major advantage over other distributed protocols like GIOP/IIOP or DCOM which are normally filtered by firewalls. XML was chosen as the standard message format because of its widespread use by major corporations and open source development efforts. Additionally, a wide variety of freely available tools significantly eases the transition to a SOAP-based implementation.

Read more at Wikipedia.org